O Canada

It's July 1st. The garden fence is bedecked with maple leaf bunting, there are flags in all the flower beds, the kids are wearing red and white and I am in my official Olympic Team Canada Hockey shirt.  Happy Canada Day!
I wanted to bake something to celebrate.  Some years I make maple cookies, a variant on gingerbreads with a healthy dose of maple syrup.  Some years it's maple and pecan melting moments. If I think of a quintessentially Canadian baked treat, I think of butter tarts.  However, it appears most others think of Nanaimo bars.
I have to admit I'd never heard of them until a Canadian acquaintance asked if I could bake some. I guess they hadn't spread to small town southern Ontario by 1985, the year I left to live in the UK. However, I googled for recipes and they look delicious.
 The story goes that Mabel Jenkins, a woman from just south of Nanaimo British Colombia made these bars for a baking competition in the 1950s. They became hugely popular, spread far and wide, and apparently have been sold by the mighty Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee and doughnut chain. (Although the idea of going to Tim Horton's for anything other than a Dutchie is madness).
I didn't get the chance to bake them for my fellow Canuck when he originally asked. I thought Canada Day would be the ideal opportunity to rectify that.
I followed the recipe from here for the most practical of reasons. Many recipes call for almonds, which I do not have. This one had walnuts or pecans - I have both and I LOVE pecans. A clear winner for me!


115g butter
50g caster sugar
30g cocoa
1 beaten egg
200g crushed digestive biscuits
50g dessicated coconut
50g chopped pecans (or walnuts, or almonds, blah blah blah.)
Melt the butter. Remove from the heat and stir in the sugar and cocoa. Add the beaten egg and return to the heat briefly, beating furiously to stop the egg getting scrambled.  Once thickened, remove from the heat and mix in the digestive crumbs, coconut and nuts. Press the mixture into an 8" square tin and refrigerate for 1 hour


50g soft butter
2 tbs custard powder
splash of vanilla
230g icing sugar
2-3 tbs double cream
Beat the ingredients together to make a spreadable buttercream, adding just enough cream to make it easy to work with. Spread across the base layer and refrigerate for 30 mins

120g dark chocolate
1 tbs butter
Melt the chocolate and butter together in a bowl over a pan of hot water.  When liquid enough to pour, spread across the custard layer. Chill for 10 to 15 minutes before serving.

As I type, the tray of bars is cooling in the fridge ready for slicing. They are VERY rich and sweet - I haven't had a finished bar but the constituent parts are enough to dissolve my teeth just looking at them. The kids are dying to tuck in. I'll report back when I can tell you how the bars have gone down.

Happy 145th birthday, Canada!

Edited to add - Oh. My. God. Terrifyingly sweet and rich, yes, but absolutely lush. The kids are already begging for more. If you fancy some, I'd drop by our house sharpish!

Tumbleweeds roll by

Hello Blog!

It's been 2 months since I last wrote anything, which is most remiss of me.  I'd like to say I was too busy lazing about in the sunshine or I was off having a fabulous time but actually I've been working.  And working. Then some more work in the gaps between the work.  I moved past busy and over-committed into Holy Crap I Need More Caffeine Stat.

A lot of my business has been to do with teaching.  I know, right? Me, actually teaching people things. Teaching used to figure on my Most Unlikely Job list, alongside athlete.  But here I am, over a year into home educating my son and running classes and workshops for baking and cake decorating.
I've done a couple of workshops here for 4 to 6 people. The kids' workshop had them making sugarpaste decorations, icing and decorating a celebration cake, using royal icing on biscuits, baking and icing cupcakes.   They took home all their creations and were so proud of themselves.  I got some lovely thank you notes; they were a wonderful group.  I'd post photos but I haven't asked their parents for permission and I do hate it when people put photos up without agreement
My next kids' workshop is this weekend.

Then there was a cupcake evening with 5 adults. They were all novice bakers so we went through basic techniques, made vanilla cupcakes and lemon and raspberry cupcakes, did buttercream icing with palette knives and piping bags, made sugarpaste decorations and drank Prosecco. Oh, and ate little cheese and marmite pastries I'd baked.  I am DEFINITELY making those again, they were delish.
Anyway, my adult students did marvellous work and have done so great baking at home as well, judging from the photos they're sending me.  I will do another class like that in a heartbeat (even though as the tutor I don't get Prosecco. Bummer.)

My other teaching work has been at local schools.  Lesley from Thomas Danby, my amazing tutor, would no doubt laugh her socks off at the thought of me teaching anyone cake decorating techniques.  I felt like the duffer of that class; there were so many talented people there I was often intimidated. But the level of stuff I'm teaching is the sort of thing I do week in and week out so i can teach it with my hands tied behind my back.

On Mondays I teach 15 people how to pipe royal icing, apply buttercream, model with sugarpaste and coat celebration cakes with sugarpaste. And example of the things wee do is the photo. The students are all women and girls - the youngest about 11, the oldest about 17 and their mums.  They are a lovely bunch. My favourite bit is watching them leave with the things they made, buzzing with a sense of achievement and happiness.  Passing on how to do something is VERY rewarding indeed.  I love what I do and I especially love helping others get fun from doing it too.

Tuesdays are more challenging.  It takes place in a primary school and is for family groups.  The age range is Reception to Year 10, with 22 people including the 5 parents.  Such a large group and enormous age range is very hard to manage successfully. Individually they are all very nice but as a group it's kind of overwhelming.  I have to dash between them so quickly, helping each one as s/he need it and setting projects that all skill levels can work within. I am always exhausted after that class.

I've also had more private commissions this last few weeks.  Some have been pretty straightforward. There have been red velvet cakes, cupcakes, plain birthday cakes with a message piped on. There have also been reflecting the passions of the recipients - hiking, lawn bowls and flowers, in one case and lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots, poppies and daffodils in another. I was very proud of the flowers; quite a few things I'd never tried before. But they are awfully time-consuming and time is something I'm running short of just now.
 I think I'm averaging about 48 hours a week at the moment. Combined with Home Ed and parenting  - not to mention the twin horrors of laundry and washing up - I'm pretty much exhausted.  Today I hit the new low of having a glass of coke with a coffee chaser in a bid to keep going.

Still, I've no business to complain. I have a business I love, I'm in demand and never have to advertise for work, and I am getting better at it all the time.  I can sleep later on. 2013 maybe.

Call me Zeitgeist-girl

I am so *very* up to the minute! I've been reading loads of baking blogs and saw something I fancied trying. As we get to weather for days out and picnics -  actually, we're in weather to stay in and avoid the torrential rain but hope springs eternal - the idea of easy to pack, hard to damage portions of cake seem just the very thing. So here we go, push up cake pops.

Crap name, must actually call it something decent.

  Anyway, I started with a tray of cake, done in two colours. I had been tempted by disposable icing bags for use in my workshops and hadn't used them myself, so I took the opportunity to have a go with them as well. I tinted the icing two shade and if I were making a bigger batch I might use 3 different colours.

Don't they look fun? They pass the first test, which is that my kids are clamouring for them. The pass the second test, which is that Himself thinks they look great. Obviously the important thing is that they taste great.  I haven't tried an assembled one yet, because I'm about to have my dinner, but I've been cheekily scoffing the trimmings and I can vouch for their deliciousness.

After that, I must do a costing. If the unit cost if more than any sane person would pay I have to give up on a project. This happens quite a lot. Decent ingredients are really rather expensive.

Then it's longevity I look at.  I will make some and store them in the cupboard, fridge and freezer and see what the various shelf lives are. In general, a fridge KILLS cake, and it drives me bananas when people store it there.  Fridges dry cake out.  However, as these are totally enclosed they ought to be fine. I think.  Hence the testing.

If all of these are positive, and to be frank I usually go back and tweak the method about a million times, I can finally look at selling them.

I think they'd be lovely for both the milkshake bar and the soft play centre. The down side is that there is a lot of plastic packaging. It can be put through the dishwasher and re-used, and is fully recyclable but it does go against the grain to have such a heavily packaged, non-biodegradable product.

Anyway, that's the latest experiment. What do you think?

Cake Boxing Guide To Life

Hello, lovely blog-reading pals!
I've not done any writing here for 2 months, which is a bit rubbish.  I've been stonkingly busy with work, Home-Ed, and some substantial home life upheavals and I'd just not had anything to say that wouldn't have included big dull moans about how tired I was.  I thought I'd spare you all that guff.
Anyway, here I am on a cold, rainy April afternoon juggling cake baking, chores, preparation for some work up ahead and teaching No 1 Son some maths.  None of these was engaging my interest very much; it was all a bit routine. So I got to thinking about how to make my day better. And because I'm friendly-like, I thought I'd share my conclusions with you.

I'm always telling my kids they they are the most powerful people in their own lives. They may not control everything that happens to them but they can choose how they react and what changes they make. If my day was to feel better I needed to practise what I preach.

1. Being Awesome
Deciding that you will be the kick-ass fabulous You for the day is generally a good plan.  I like Awesome Me way better than Can't Be Bothered Me, although she has her time and place.  Awesome Me is more likely to get stuff done, and more likely to make sure she fits something ace in to her day.  The act of deciding to Be Awesome means I approach the day in a more positive, productive and flexible way. My eldest approves of Awesome Me, which is a high endorsement indeed.
Should you feel you need inspiration for Being Awesome, why not visit The Bloggess? She'll steer you right.

2. Coffee
I love coffee.  I really, really LOVE coffee. One of the things I like most is what it stands for - a couple of minutes break from what I'm doing, a small gesture of being cared for (because coffee made by someone else is the best kind). Having a small indulgence definitely makes a day nicer. I've gone from instant to cafetiere to individual filters to cheap espresso machine to proper espresso machine and I don't begrudge any of the money we've spent. Proper coffee is delicious. Not to mention the caffeine kick. All hail the Goddess of Coffee!

3. A List
Everything is better if you have a List. Sometimes the List is so long that I intimidate myself, but at least once it's all written down I'm not trying to remember everything. Also, they mean I can easily prioritise things because I can see them all at once rather than remembering in a panic that I meant to do such-and-such before ringing so-and-so.  And of course the MAIN joy of a list is crossing things off it. For that reason I write mine the old fashioned way, with a notepad and pencil. My laptop or iPhone can do lists too, but crossing items off is less fun that way.

4. Tom Petty
Happy guitar music is one of the most ace ways to banish tedium.  It helps if you know the words and can belt out the chorus along with the laconic Mr Petty but fake it if necessary.  Free Fallin', Yer So Bad, Learning to Fly, You Wreck Me... I love heaps of them. Oh, had a thought! There's also Tom Petty in The Travelling Wilburys, and that gets you George Harrison, which leads neatly onto the Greatest Pop Song Ever Written, Here Comes The Sun, and by extension all of The Beatles' music. Crappy days are less crappy when you sing to happy guitar music.

5. Growing Something
Not a beer belly, not a hairy chin (middle age can be a bitch for both genders.) I mean growing plants. My preference is for stuff you can eat rather than the strictly decorative stuff, but to start with I grew winter pansies in pots by my back door and those made me happy too. Nowadays we rock an Allotment Chic look i.e. very grubby with scaffolding plank raised beds and plumbing tubing as hoops to hold the netting in place. But just having a small plastic trough with cut-and-come-again salad seeds planted there would do just as well.  I get so much happiness from having some of my own grown veg in my dinner. I really can't recommend it highly enough. 15 minutes a day outside faffing with the garden does me no end of good.

Not glamorous, but wonderful anyway

6. Fridge Magnets
Built in fridges that coordinate with the kitchen are kind of depressing.  I like a busy fridge.  Ours, as you can see, is full of stuff the kids made, receipts, invitations, reminders, vouchers, tickets, and lots and lots of fridge magnets. They are one of my favourite souvenirs because they don't take much packing room, are cheap and easily available, and I look at them all the time. Especially the ones from New York. I nearly always wish I were in New York at any given moment.

Also, if you are feeling really fed up you can use the magnetic letters to spell rude words.  A small act of rebellious silliness can do a soul a power of good. It's quite important to remember to change them before the kids come in, though. Oops.

7. iPlayer
Thank you, BBC, for the wonderful, marvellous delight that is iPlayer. The laptop plugs into speakers in the kitchen, and I can listen to ANYTHING while I work.  Only caught Woman's Hour on the Jane Garvey days (ho hum) but missed the Jenni-Queen-Of-Fabulous-Murray shows? Easy peasy, click on iPlayer and there it is. Stories, music, comedy, current affairs, documentaries: the delightful boffins at the BBC give them all to us. Adam and Joe's 6Music show was my favourite but now they're off doing other stuff like writing movies, so I dabble with different shows.  I keep forgetting I shouldn't listen to The News Quiz when I'm mixing things because the Kitchen Aid drowns out what they're saying.  However, with iPlayer I can rewind the radio. Modern life is brilliant.

8. Exercise
Just kidding.  No, honestly, I'm joking. I know all the theory about how good exercise makes you feel and how it helps in innumerable ways but I hate it worse than rats. With the exceptions of skating outdoors and rowing on the boating lake in Central Park I have hated pretty much every bit of exercise I've ever tried. Walking is good, because it takes you places. Getting tired, sweaty and wheezing for no actual purpose is my idea of hell. How about a nice cup of coffee and a slice of cake while you read your book instead?

See? There are heaps of things I could do to make my dull day better.  So I did.

A Helping Hand

This week I have a work experience student with me.
She's friendly, interested, smart and hard working - all ace.  She also LOVES cleaning, practically thumps me if I go to do the washing up and keeps asking if she can stay to mop the floor because mopping is fun.  This I find richly bizarre. But I'm all for it.  God knows I hate cleaning and regard washing up as the worst bit of the job.
On the first day she rather slowed me down.  It takes a while to get confident with new equipment and to feel settled, obviously.  However, the pace was far slower than I'd anticipated.  I was a little worried because I knew I had an extremely busy week ahead. Would I be able to get the Valentine and half term orders?
I needn't have worried. By Tuesday she was mucking in, volunteering to do things and really being a great help.
I tried to alternate her tasks between the workaday chores and playing with icing.  She had fun doing the faces on the gingerbread men, became a dab hand at sugar roses and loved icing the mini cupcakes. Across the week we talked about a design for a celebration cake of her own.
Today, amongst the orders for customers, we've made a vanilla and berry marble cake for her. She cut it into 3 layers, spread berry coulis and buttercream between the layers, covered with a crumb coat then sugarpaste. As I type she's making the last few roses to go on it. I think she'll be very pleased with her work.
I've missed Radio 4, talking to myself while I work and singing aloud whenever I fancy. I'll miss all the help and having someone to tackle the washing up - although I won't miss trying to remember not to swear every time I drop something!

Cocktails, anyone?

Today I had a go at a gin and tonic cake.  I had a good browse online, looking at others' experiments. I made tiny gin and tonic mini cakes some years back using my beloved Annie Bell book, but they hadn't impressed me.
I started with a light lemon cake as the base -
225g butter
225g caster sugar
zest of a lemon
4 eggs
225g self raising flour
a splash of milk.
As usual, I creamed the butter, sugar and zest together, added the eggs one at a time and the flour.  It was a bit stiff so I poured in a splash of milk. I baked the cake in two 20cm round tins for 25 minutes at 180 degrees C.
Then I made the syrup.  I wanted that quinine taste of tonic and a good splash of gin.  however, i only had the VERY nice gin I was bought for Christmas, so I was a little more stinting that I would be if it had been cheaper stuff.
100ml tonic water
100g caster sugar
juice of 1/2 the lemon
25ml gin
I simmered the tonic and the sugar together until the sugar had dissolved and the liquid had about halved.  I added the lemon and the gin - it smelled lovely!  I brushed the syrup across the warm cake very liberally as it came out of the oven and left it to cool.
For the icing, I wanted a nice smooth white butter cream with a gin kick.
100g butter
250g icing sugar
G&T syrup
25ml gin
I beat the butter until it was white, added the icing sugar and drizzled in the G&T syrup I'd got remaining after brushing the cakes. It was too mild so i added another 25ml of gin.  It's still to mild - you get a lovely juniper whiff as you smell it but the taste is just a lemon and something. You'd not guess G&T.  I'm having another go with more gin in the icing. Just as soon as I have a cheaper brand of gin to play with.

New Year, New You?

I'd been looking forward to January.
This is my 4th January trading as Cake Box (happy 3rd anniversary to me!) and the previous three have been deathly quiet.  Everyone's full of New Year Resolutions about healthy eating,  Indulgences like cake are brushed aside as people join gyms, think about summer holidays and go on diets. Or at the very least looking to the credit card statements with some nervousness after the Christmas spend.
It's the prospect of this extended period of quiet that keeps me going through the very busy autumn.  By Christmas week I'm ready to hibernate. Orders will be down, I can choose not to accept the birthday or anniversary orders from private customers. I can use the time to recover from the marathon baking session that October to December involves and I can look to the future.
Well, that's the theory.
I don't know what went on this year. The deli had a quiet fortnight but the soft play centre went mental for cake. Orders were up, not down.  I had my much-anticipated weekend away, but the work either side was heavier than ever.
So here I am, on the last day of January. I'd done my tax return in plenty of time and my admin is up to date. But I've not worked out a business plan for the year, nor done any recipe testing.  I have a fair amount of guilt about that.
Looking forward, I've an interesting fortnight ahead.  From Monday I've a work experience pupil with me for a week.  I've worked out which jobs to give her and which skills and techniques I can show her.  It's my hope that she'll do some of the low skilled stuff that chews up my time - stuff like washing up and wiping the counters down - as well as some baking and cake decorating.
One job she's looking forward to and I'm delighted to be rid of for a week is piping the faces on the gingerbread men. It's the sort of job that is fun if you don't do it often. However, it is a right pain if you're doing 150 of them at the end of a busy day when your hand is so tired it keeps cramping.
We'll also talk abut how to professionally cover a cake and ideally she'll design and make a celebration cake across the course of the week that she can take home for half term.
Should time allow, I'll use the opportunity to do some recipe testing while I've help to hand.  I've got a list of HEAPS of things I'd like to try.
During half term itself we hope to have the marvellous Miss P back with us.  She did a few days of work experience with me in the summer and charmed the whole family into loving her.  She's impossibly tall and beautiful, good company and ace with the kids.  If she's this marvellous at 16, she'll set the world alight by her 20s.  She's been asked to decorate a wedding cake for a family member, and I've invited her to come here and use my equipment to help her.
If I do get some new cakes ready, I'll pop here to post the recipes, I promise!